No rewards for corruption

As the law now stands, state employees' pensions are pretty much sacrosanct. Regardless of the behavior of their intended recipients, they cannot easily be taken away.

Happily, that isn't likely to continue to be the case. The Assembly State Government Committee has approved a bill that would require public officials convicted of corruption to forfeit their state pensions. Companion legislation is being sponsored in the state Senate.

Currently, it is up to the state pension board to decide whether a convicted wrongdoer ought to be drawing a state pension. Often the benefit is reduced in direct proportion to how many credits were earned during the commission of the crime. For state legislators to decide that someone who is corrupt shouldn't get a penny might not be easy.

But they must.

New Jersey taxpayers are already shouldering more than enough of a burden without having to shell out pensions for government officials who have been convicted of misusing the public money with which they were entrusted.

Some may say that this sounds cruel, that officials earned those pensions. We say tough. Once they dip their fingers in the till, the consequences are their own fault. No one else's.

This is a case in which both traditional goals of punishment are appropriate: It sanctions those who have already committed violations, and perhaps it will have a deterrent effect on those tempted to commit them in the future.

The conviction yesterday of former state senator Wayne Bryant, who was chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, only serves to reinforce the need for this legislation. Bryant was found guilty of bribery and pension fraud. Also convicted was R. Michael Gallagher, the former dean at the University of Medicine and Dentistry's School of Osteopathic Medicine.

Even without the legislation pending in the Statehouse, Bryant and Gallagher would not be able to collect their pensions while behind bars. But there should never have been even a question as to whether they would get them.